Is history science? If so, it would have to demonstrate, and pure history resembles a descriptive catalogue of fact rather than a series of demonstrations. It is, as Thucydides illustrates, a record of what happened in the past.
Moreover, history in the natural order has no first principles, and such principles, we saw, are necessary for a science. Such a judgment might even be turned around. There is no necessity in historical events, and necessity is surely one of the characteristics of science.
Finally, when examined as to its scientific character, history will be found to own no universality. Every historical event is, in the last analysis, an individual event, and our knowledge of that event is a knowledge of something individual. In short, our study of pure history does not rise above space and time to the universal and necessary connections among things as reasoned out from first and certain principles. Consequently, for a number of reasons, history cannot be put down as a science.
Is history opinion? True enough Thucydides freely introduces opinion into his history, but if history is no more than opinion, it must share the uncertainty of opinion. In such a case, we would know only as probable that Caesar invaded Gaul, that Wellington conquered Napoleon, that Washington spent a winter at Valley Forge, that Clovis, king of the Franks, became a convert. No respectable historian would want to assign all such events to the limbo of probable knowledge. Hence, history would seem to give us more than merely probable knowledge.
Is history perhaps rhetoric? If so, it would be an art of persuasion, even weaker in certitude than dialectic. It is true that an excellent rhetorician like Lincoln or Pericles may use historical events as devices of persuasion, and it is also true that many textbooks in history take a rhetorical position in favor of a viewpoint held beforehand by their authors, such as nationalism or Communism. But history if it is not dialectic, certainly is not mere rhetoric either.
Nor can history be identified with literature. It is true that both the historical and literary writer are concerned somehow with the individual. But literature, we have seen, involves discourse, whereas in history events follow not from each other but only after each other in temporal sequence. Furthermore, genuine history must always be true, but literature need only be plausible. Alike under certain aspects, the historian and literary man, from other angles, are profoundly different in both interest and technique.
Some distinctions. To get at the more positive meaning of historical knowledge, it is important to make some distinctions. As Hegel remarked, the word history applies unfortunately both to what actually happened in the past and to our study of such happenings. History is a stream of events having physical reality outside the mind and at the same time it is a subject studied by the mind and having a place in the curriculum of schools. Chemistry is also a subject; but when we name what the subject is about, we do not call it chemistry. Chemistry is about physical things, not about chemistry. So too with literature, theology, mathematics, and all other subjects. But history, as a study, is not distinguished in name from its subject matter. History designates the study, and it designates what the study is about. In order to avoid ambiguity, the term history will be employed throughout this chapter to mean history as a form of knowledge rather than history as a stream of events, though the material studied by the historian will affect our verdict concerning the kind of knowledge he enjoys. Moreover, in the interests of simplification, only human history will be considered throughout this chapter, thus omitting natural history with its descriptions of the cosmos in a pre-scientific way.
A second and even more capital distinction obtains between the facts of history, like the date of Charlemagne's coronation, and the opinion about those facts expressed by this or that historian. Thucydides records a number of facts in the passage quoted, but even more striking are his opinions, even his generalizations, about those facts. In a similar vein, it is true that the Roman Empire collapsed and that by the sixth century it had ceased to exist; but the causes of Rome's decline and fall are a matter of constant controversy among students of the phenomenon. That Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were prominent figures in the early American government is beyond dispute, but the relative merits of their different economic views can be argued back and forth among their admirers. The ordinary history book includes the dimension of fact and that of opinion. In order to evaluate history, however, these two aspects of the typical text book must be distinguished. In what follows, the concern will be with history as factual knowledge, the knowledge of dates and places and figures of the past. Such knowledge is the fundamental kind of historical knowledge since upon it all opinions by historian claim their base.
History and faith. What then about our knowledge of the facts of history? These facts are usually made known to us by the testimony of men who witnessed them. Such eyewitnesses either wrote reports of what they observed or by word of mouth informed those who later wrote reports. Sometimes the testimony of witnesses to historical events did not pass into written form for centuries after the event itself. While unwritten, such testimony forms that kind of historical knowledge which is called tradition. Illiterate primitive peoples can often recite their ancestry back through many generations. History for them never assumes a written form at all.
Actually, the recent as well as the more remote past constitutes the field of historical knowledge. News stories tonight of what happened this morning are history when we read about them. But again we are dependent on witnesses and reporters.
But however known and whether of the recent or remote past, what we call historical knowledge usually is known on somebody else's word. That George Washington was the first president of the United States is known to us on the authority of those who witnessed his presidency and handed down their testimony in the form of oral or written records or both. To accept a proposition on the authority of another is knowledge by faith. Our knowledge of history then depends on our faith.
What has been said about historical knowledge as a form of faith must be qualified in one important respect. All of an individual's past is history and can be known by him as an historian. Events, important or trivial, which we have personally witnessed we do not know only on the authority of a witness. We remember them. However, in discussing history as a subject, we are usually referring to events distant from us in space and time and not coming within our experience except in some accidental way. Hence, although our own memory can attest to the history of our own past, the kind of knowledge that usually gets into history books is known by the testimony of witnesses and accepted by us on a faith in their words. The historian must test the authenticity and credibility of the witnesses which he uses to reconstruct the past. But such tests involve another problem that we need not consider here.
History and other knowledges. There is then a crucial distinction between history and any of the forms of natural knowledge, inductive or syllogistic, studied so far. All such knowledge, from the scientific to the literary, depends upon what is called intrinsic evidence. The evidence from which such knowledge begins is open to our own observation and our own personal experience. Anything so observed and experienced contains, in principle, enough intrinsic evidence so that we can know something about it and even conclude to its causes. But the facts of our direct experience do not enable us to deduce that Washington was president or even that he existed at all. Such knowledge depends on evidence outside our experience and indeed, it rests on the word of somebody else. Such evidence may be called extrinsic. History is therefore a record of the past compiled by extrinsic evidence, like the testimony of witnesses. Knowledge here is a form of faith.
It is true of course that the historian sometimes depends upon unwritten and unspoken records to achieve a knowledge of his subject. He uses such devices as monuments or coins or drawings as evidence for facts he establishes concerning man's past. But even here the study of the past proceeds by instrumental signs extrinsic to the men and the events they signify, and requiring, to the extent that they are purely historical phenomena, a faith that what they signify is true. A monument or an excavated city, like Pompeii, are signs as artificial in principle as the language of an eyewitness would be.
History is neither science nor art. It rests on natural faith. The opinions by historians about historical events can be formed into dialectical syllogisms and inductions, but history, the record of the past, on which such opinion rests, differs in kind from the arts and sciences so far studied. History rests on extrinsic evidence, while science depends upon evidence intrinsic to experience.
Though neither a science nor an art, history serves a function, as no other subject, in initiating us to the tradition of which we are the heirs and continuators. By extending our individual experience to the dimensions of our whole culture, it enables us to profit from the triumphs and failures of the human spirit. By showing us what others have said and done, it aids us to know what we ourselves should think and do. In this respect, history is a valuable preparation for science, giving us in the intellectual order those opinions where dialectic must begin and in the moral order that experience of others' conduct which aids us to regulate our own.
It's good to get confirmation that one is on the right track from someone whom one admires and holds up as a master. Students should be learning more logic and distinguishing between opinion and knowledge...
Note: Look for Hackett edition of Port Royal logic.
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